The Musings of Knowledge and Thought
by Chen ZiXin
Summary: A compilation of short segments of thought from the most distant perspective.
1. Effort

**Disclaimer: The usual. You guys should know these by now.**

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Eh… h.. H…

Hel.. lo…? Can you hear… see/read this?

My. This will take… time… to get used to. It is so… different from… what I normally do. Everything is, I suppose, different for me than it is for you.

_Who am I?_

That is… a good question. I think I would like to answer that for myself. I… don't really think anyone can answer that question. There really is too much to say, and too little we… you and I both… understand.

Talking. Words. Not. Not used to it. No. Sorry. You'll have to bear with me. I'm trying.

Perhaps I don't really know who I am, nor why I'm speaking to you. Maybe I do not truly know anything. We shall see, perhaps.

For now, I would like for you to see me as someone or something that contains knowledge and thought. In fact… I've long come to see myself as only knowledge and thought. Ever present, ever learning. Once upon a time I would've even believed that everything was knowledge and thought.

…

I apologise. Am I boring you? I do not think you came here to listen to my rambling. You must've come here for stories. Adventures. New things to learn, read, think about.

Very well. I shall tell you these… tales… as best as I can, and hope you will be objective in your interpretation.

Thank you for your… patience… and understanding.

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**A/N: this story is remade from its previous iteration "Greater Effort of the Thought Entity", and all its chapters were scrapped and replaced by new ones as I didn't like where it was going previously.**

**This is a story which I decided to start because I noticed that most interpretations of the DITE were generally negative, or that it was some big omnipotent alien, and I wanted to try and see what things would be like from its perspective.**

**I've made the DITE a lot less confusing sounding this time around, to make it easier to read.**


	2. Melancholy I - Library

Picture a library. A vast, old library. Books. Knowledge. Worlds. Silence.

If it were me… I'd be the librarian.

No… not the… not the librarian. Simply… the only person in the library.

_Would that make me the librarian by default?_ I wonder.

I like reading. Not the act of reading, but what it gives me. It gives me knowledge, and it lets me think. Learning and dreaming.

Many books. So much knowledge on so many things. So many stories… so many universes to live in and explore and understand. All the comedies, tragedies, histories, sciences… I love them all equally. I read, for that is all I need. Not food or water, nor comfort of companionship. I need only learning and thinking and nothing more. I had defined myself my own meaning of life and existence, and I was happy.

In my learning and thinking, however, it dawned upon me, the reader, that the library had its limits. I could read for a very long time, I could even slow down the pace I could read at, but I would ultimately run out of new books to read. No new books were published or shelved.

Mathematically… speaking, I suppose… I might as well have already run out of books to read from the moment I was born.

It is… a melancholic… feeling. To know that your purpose is finite… but your time is not.

From this I started to quest through all the books… all my knowledge and thoughts and memories… I searched for an alternative. I searched now not for mere knowledge or thought-provoking philosophy, and instead searched for potential. The ability to create new knowledge, new books… new worlds.

Strictly speaking… I was successful. I had indeed, found potential. Or… rather, the potential somehow found me. It was not easy… no… not for me… to understand what it was, at first. It was like for the first time in my life I had heard someone knocking on the door to the library.

No… that's not the most accurate comparison. I'm sorry… I can't… explain it too well.

It was… hard to understand it. I couldn't understand it alone, I knew. I had to think of an answer; I had to think about how to understand what it was, and how to, if possible, to grab a hold of it.

I needed, between myself and the… potential… some sort of a medium. A bridge.

Perhaps… perhaps you could call it an interface?


	3. Melancholy II - Program

Programming.

I… think that's how I would describe it.

A translation tool. It turns what I say and mean into what the other side can understand, and vice versa.

I made one.

I did it all myself, you could say. Coded it all. Designing. Testing for errors. Regularly updating it.

I am… a fast learner. I… know a lot of things. And my translating tool was one of those things I knew about. I remembered everything as I programmed it. I knew everything about the codes of the tool. I thought knowing it would help me understand the translations.

_Ah… I was so wrong._

You see, knowledge is not understanding. I knew everything about the tool, but I didn't understand it. I knew what the codes were, what they did and why they were needed, and I also knew what the program would be saying to me. But I did not understand what the codes were or how the program understood them.

In reality, the program was just as alien to me as the person on the other side it was translating for.

I automatically assumed, based on my knowledge of the translating tool, so many things; I assumed it would know as much as I did. I assumed it would understand me. I assumed that it would act on my every command the exact way I wanted to, and to faithfully slave away with unquestioned loyalty. I had assumed that the translation tool was nothing more than a single set of numbers and characters on a display.

So many misunderstandings happened because of that.

I asked the program to perform a simple set of tasks. The translation tool… sent me back so many different messages. All of them were… less than adequate. Most of them were corrupted, nonsensical gibberish. Many of them conflicted with one another. It amazed me. How was it that a single program went in several different directions, even though I only asked of it a single set of tasks?

I began to… search… manually, you could say. Looking for what had gone wrong. It had turned out that the program was, somehow… not a singular entity, but a… collection. A group. Several smaller, and also much more limited nodes.

_Why is this?_ I asked. It was upon… further searching that I realised: What I was trying to communicate to was… also not a singular entity, but a group. I was not speaking to a single person, but several. My translation tool, in an attempt to cover this issue, had split itself into several parts to try and capture the essence of the disunity of what I was communicating with.

This was when I realised… things will be harder than I first thought.


	4. Melancholy III - Mother

_Would I be a good mother?_

Let us imagine, for a moment, that I am a mother of children. If… that is the case… then I believe I might not be a good one.

I know… a fact… that I was careless in the past.

At that time, you could describe the situation as… parental neglect? Yes… that may be it.

I… I know it is no excuse but… let us say that I'm a single working mother, staying long hours at a space station to prevent the universe from imploding.

A mother of many, many children that I had… only ever seen as a group. I did not talk to them as individuals… I would only ever talk to all my children as a… collective whole. And even so, only seldom. Watched them with…detached interest from afar… sometimes. Mostly… I left them to their own devices.

On the rare chances that I did… speak to my children… I would only ever give them a brief lecture on… issues that they were most likely too young to understand… and to give them puzzles too hard for them to solve. Perhaps… I somehow expected them to appreciate learning and thought the same way I did. And perhaps… they did.

One time, when I did drop by to see my children as a group _(again, I did not yet recognize my individual children at the time)_. Some of them were quite pleased to see me, and showed me… let us say, showed me pictures of things they found in their search for divine truth to my… enigmas.

These pictures were most colourful and… they all showed me many different things, both about what my children had learned, as well as… allowing me to realise that my children had grown to become… such wonderful individuals.

They showed me pictures of what they saw as the 'answer' to my… riddles. They also showed me pictures of… what seemed to be others; people that had nothing to do with myself, nor my children, who also seemed to come to the same answer… even though they had different riddles.

Let us call one of these pictures "Kyon" _(even though that is most certainly not the name of anyone or anything in particular)_. This picture was… certainly unique, I knew. I smiled when I saw this picture, as it seemed to correlate well with what I wanted my children to… learn and think about.

While I was certainly delighted that my children had… produced these pictures, it had taken them three years to do so. Giving the children back the pictures, I said to them, "While all this is well and good, but I'm a little surprised how little you've found."

This is something quite tactless to say, perhaps. But remember, I am single working mother working at a space station for long hours; I never quite learnt tact. My comment was purely an observation.

My children, however, seemed to get worried. They thought I was disappointed in them, and they were scared I was going to abandon them. They started pointing fingers, blaming one another. They started crying and apologizing and begging me to stay. Many of them started to try and show me as many pictures as possible, in a desperate effort to keep my attention.

Naturally, I was surprised. I tried to calm them down, telling them stories, and explaining to them many things, hoping they'd be set on the right track again. However, all the children seemed to take different lessons on what my explanation meant. All of these children had different responses.

They… over time… even to this day, I suppose… they argued. They began to separate from one another; no longer children of a single family, but several factions, trying to fulfil what they each believed to be my true wishes. It is saddening. They are all correct, yet… they are all so misguided.

Some believed in silence and nature. Others believed in cautious steps and planning. Others still believed in adding catalysts to increase efficiency. Some wished for compromise, some would switch between factions.

At first… I didn't quite understand what this meant. I was… amused… at the time, at their innocent debates and biases. Occasionally I would even… give encouragement… to try and motivate them into deeper thought processes.

I watched them argue… perhaps the way one watches… kittens… play fighting. That was what I saw it as. Play fighting.

I didn't realise… as a result of my encouragement… I had accidentally turned their disagreements to rivalries and, too quickly… to hatred.


	5. Melancholy IV - Knife

**A/N: If you have been following this work when it was still titled "The Greater Effort of the Thought Entity" then you will have to reread this work from the start as all previous content has been replaced, including chapter names and the story's current name. Apologies for the inconvenience. I hope this is considered an improvement, or at the very least, not a decline.**

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It was so sudden.

A knife._ Why a knife?_ I wondered. It was the first natural question that occurred to me. _You're capable of much more efficient methods to commit homicide. Why a knife?_

I quickly realised, with priority adjustments, a more immediate question. _Wait. Why must you resort to this? Why violence? Why killing?_

"Isn't that what you wanted?" she asked in response. "To learn. To create potential for new things."

_Yes, that is what I asked of you._

"So that's why. Killing _Kyon_ will create potential beyond what any of us could imagine."

_No. Please. That's not what I mean. I didn't want this. Don't kill him. This isn't what I asked for._

"But you just said it is, didn't you?"

_No. Please stop. Somebody stop her. Please, I do not like violence. I never wanted to hurt anyone._

A second girl came. She was close by, and was watching from since before the conversation started. "Do you want me to stop her?"

_Yes, of course._

"Do I have to save him at any cost?"

_Yes, please. Save the boy. He shouldn't be hurt like this._

She complied.

But… she didn't comply in the way I thought she would.

Instead… more violence. Fighting… between the two girls erupted.

No. No no no! _Why is this happening!?_ _Why are you two trying to kill each other? Please stop! Please stop! I beg you! I care about the both of you! Please stop! Please… stop…!_

_Please…_

It was too late. Neither of them were listening. They were already too busy fighting to hear me.

_Is this my fault?_ I began to ask myself._ Did I really ask for this? Is this what I truly wanted?_

I made a mistake. I always knew everything, I always thought of everything, yet I made a mistake. I was scared.

The fight ended. The knife was gone. The boy was alive, as was the girl who saved him. The girl who tried to kill him was not. All because I failed to talk to them. Because I didn't understand them. Because they tried so hard to please me.

_This is all my fault. I've messed up. I'm sorry. Please… forgive me._


	6. Melancholy V - Balance

My mistakes of the past were not in lack of knowledge, nor in lack of thought. I am nothing if not knowledge and thought. Instead… they were a lack of acknowledgement of the significance of said knowledge and thought.

Perhaps… you could imagine that I must forever multitask. Some things will, naturally, be deemed more important than others, while others I may pay only token attention to. It is only when there is a… drastic change in one of these actions that it will suddenly take precedence over the other actions, and causing a shift in the balance of attention.

Hence, after the incident, I likewise shifted balance of attention.

Indeed… balance is an important thing. Much of my knowledge and thought on… the matter… concludes in some maintenance of balance:

There is the balancing of the… 'factions'… of my agents. There is the balance of timing and location. The balance of _'Kyon'_ and _'Suzumiya Haruhi'_.

And of course, the balance of the forces, and their ideologies, around them. The so called… _'SOS brigade'._

These forces, including myself and my agents, must regularly adjust and react to the action of any other force, including one another, in order to maintain all the aforementioned balances, as well as many unmentioned ones.

For much of my time I had chosen… not to acknowledge these forces as significant. Maybe I simply wanted to feign ignorance. Maybe it was hubris.

Think of it this way: Due to mutual interests in the same point, that is_ 'Suzumiya Haruhi'_, we as forces were swiftly brought together as a corporation with more or less equal value voting shares. I did not exactly ask to join the corporation, but my agent had already signed the contract (perhaps was coerced into doing so).

By the most part, I don't like showing up at meetings, nor do I like to send my agents to meetings. While it may seem irresponsible there is perfectly good reason, at least from my perspective: It is because I know the other two shareholders very well, and both of them are ridiculous.

Let us take the time travellers, first.

I have had many dealings with these beings in both past and future… in this universe and others… and I can say that I am not exactly impressed by them.

They are… (they 'have been', from my perspective, and 'will be' from yours)… limited in their capacities of time space. To them, time is a linear thing; something akin to a track… a river. They themselves are only ever at one point. They cannot easily change between routes they follow, unless they consciously go in reverse and choose a different route.

Most inefficient.

Second is the… 'ESPers'.

If the time travellers are people that I find… less than impressive… then ESPers are people I find amazing. I'm not amazed by their abilities, nor their capacities. Rather... I'm amazed that they have evolved enough brain cells to _breathe._

They are delusional.

Fanatics of an asinine cult that makes up its justifications as it goes. Whatever they do not understand they will simply call it an act of God. What they cannot see they deny the existence of. They stubbornly resist rationale of any sort that does not coincide with their own, and will desperately destroy evidence that work against them.

These are the two factors that I have to put up with on a daily basis. I've listened to them, past, present, future… this world and others… constantly arguing over the most mundane things, all the way to their graves and beyond.

That is why I wanted to ignore them. I… still want to ignore them. And I know I will always want to ignore them. At the very least… I try to stay out of their arguments. I keep as silent as I can. Sometimes… I just read a book on nuclear physics during board meetings and pretend to be deaf if they talk to me.

Unfortunately… I know better than that. I have long calculated their significance to be greater than I wish it to be, and to an extent, they know it. Us three factors of the _Save-Our-Selves incorporated_ are forced into co-operating in order to maintain balance, especially when one of the three of us accidentally tips the balance.

For instance… the time travellers, and their primary representative, _'Asahina Mikuru'_, whom they claim to have been 'predetermined' as their representative. Predetermined or not, it had, in itself, tipped the balance, not between us three as factions, but between _'Kyon'_ and _'Suzumiya Haruhi'_.

I suppose… I should have told the other two factors about this. But I didn't. I've already figured out the ending, though, and I didn't feel the need to tell my time traveller and ESPer time travellers would probably know as well, and the ESPers would deny all evidence.

At most the universe will end; something I did not mind in the slightest, since I've witnessed more than my fair share of apocalypses. Perhaps… I kept silent because it wasn't necessary. Perhaps I kept silent because it had become customary.

And perhaps… I kept silent because I wanted to see them screaming in terror as they fell down the deep end.


	7. Melancholy VI - Dreams

Death and life. Future and past. Dreams and reality. End and beginning.

These are notions that do not quite apply to me, as you understand it. As such, I was not really all that disturbed by the event. I could no longer connect to my future self, but I was certain that I would have a future self after the incident. I would survive regardless of the result, so I really had nothing to worry about.

By contrast, the other two factors had reactions correlated and perhaps inversely proportionate to their understanding of the event.

The beings of your future were (will be) most apologetic for causing the event, but have (will) come to see it as an inevitability in their timeline, and will in future actively encourage this event to happen. The actual time travellers at the time of the event, however, were terrorised, being no longer guided by their future selves. I believe you could describe them to be 'like headless chicken'. Agents incapable of organised movement due to lack of instruction from a centre of thought.

The ESPers, meanwhile, were panicking without exception. They scream and yell at the time travellers, at themselves, at the world around them. They claim that the apocalypse has been brought upon the world, and expect us to do something about it. They are a cult abandoned by their own 'god', and they bitterly try to pin the blame on anything but themselves. As I had previously expected, they are useless.

I opted out of the chance for a final 'meeting' with those two. If the world is truly ending, as the ESPers believe it to, I would prefer that I do not spend my final moments in their company.

I turned my attention to my children. Their reaction was as I had expected it, but I was disappointed nonetheless. They were, in a way, much like the time travellers and ESPers I had decided to avoid. They pointed at each other, pinning blame, making accusations, and desperately trying to connect to their future selves for guidance.

One by one, I calmed them down. For the first time I listened to them as individuals, on everything they wanted to say to me, before lulling them each to sleep. Perhaps when they wake again they will find that their world has returned to normal, and they will continue about their daily lives as my precocious, naive children. Perhaps their sleep will be eternal. In any case, they didn't have to worry any more.

As I was doing so, I noted from the corner of my eye, one child gradually snuck away, believing I hadn't noticed. The one who saved the boy from the knife.

_Nagato Yuki_. That was her 'name'.

Yes… she was the one. A most rebellious child, so full of spirit and energy. Often she would withhold information from me, or even lie to me outright, thinking I wasn't clever enough to catch her. She was the least rational and the most impulsive of all of my programmed children. She was also the one closest to the SOS brigade, being a member of it. Such a troublesome child. I'm fairly certain she hates me.

I muse as to whether or not to follow her.

"You're not going to stop her, are you?"

_Asakura Ryoko. _The girl that started the knife incident. She was a bit more rational than _Nagato Yuki_, but still amongst the most impulsive.

"You're going to go after her! To punish her for running off alone!"

The girl stood in front of me, her arms outstretched in a feeble attempt to block my path.

"I won't let you stop her!" she said, in childish determination. "She's finally made new friends! She has every right to try and speak to them one last time! You can't force her to stay behind and watch!"

I was amused, just a little. "Isn't that what I made you for?" I asked. "Your duty is to stand and watch, is it not?"

"That's so cruel!" she yelled. She was angry, sad, frightened. So passionate. "How could you say something so heartless!? We've been observing endlessly for years but you barely pay attention to anything we say! You ignore us for most of our lives, and when one of us finally has something we truly want to protect you want to force us to watch silently as it fades away!"

Her yelling had stirred up the rest of the children. Some of them stood by her side. Others told her to be quiet. Others still begged me not to get angry, and to forgive her for speaking out.

All of them were scared of me. They all saw me as a master, a tyrannical ruler.

_Is this what my children truly think of me?_ I wondered._ How much of this is true?_

Once again, I had to hush the children from their panic, one by one, before I at last addressed Asakura Ryoko.

"Very well," I said to her. "I'll let her have her way, this once."

The girl's face began to brighten into a relieved smile.

"However," I continued, "you have to promise me that nothing like this will happen ever again."

Asakura Ryoko thought for a moment, before giving a nod. I knew her promise was meaningless, and likewise, I knew that incidents will occur with increasing frequency in future. Nonetheless, I let her and Nagato Yuki off the hook. In spirit of the moment, I decided to take things just a step further.

Leaning in closer to the girl, I whispered. "Tell her to mention the story of '_Sleeping Beauty_'. It might help."

The girl's face showed surprise and confusion for a moment. Quickly, though, she understood, and shot off to catch up to her fellow runaway.

I knew I would one day regret the autonomy I give my interfaces, but at the time I certainly did feel a little bit of happiness for them. As much as they annoy one another, and bicker amongst themselves and also with the time travellers and ESPers, they've seemingly grown attached to one another. One day, I knew, I'd also come to terms with the time travellers and ESPers (though the latter don't know it yet).

I retreated, finally, back to my library in solitude, waiting with full confidence that balance will be restored, the world will be saved, and that the morning will come.

And come morning did.

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**A/N: And this concludes the first arc of the story. This chapter actually ended up shorter than I thought it would, which was great, since I didn't want the chapters to be long ones (at least not yet).**

**Not sure what to think of what I've done so far, though, nor where to bring this in the future. Most things that happen in the Haruhi series actually don't directly involve the Data Overmind until Disappearance (which, if I take this fanfic that far, is going to be very hard to write, because I don't know what to do with that either).**


	8. Boredom I - Children

I believe I've made it clear, by this point, that I am a body of knowledge and thought. I see things as fact and reality, and little else. An embodiment of pure and unbiased information with little emotion attached. At least... that's one way I have found best to describe myself. Perhaps it is true. Perhaps not.

As such, I find the notion of faith and religion to be... peculiar. It is effectively an attempt by beings to attempt to understand something that is beyond their actual level of comprehension, and as such, are often rather baseless.

Hence, I have little respect for these... 'ESPers', or the organisation created around them.

As a being that has lasted as long as the universe and encompassing information and thought, and nothing else, I find it hard to believe that a small group of empowered mortal beings that do not even encompass the entirety of a species which has only displayed sentience for a tiniest fraction of its planet's life span would somehow be able to have a more valid opinion on the functions of the universe as I do.

I know... I'm rambling about those that I dislike, and it is wrong to do so. But I truly, truly find the 'ESPers' an almost intolerably arrogant and ridiculous group.

Perhaps it'd be easier to understand if I gave an example...

Baseball. A sporting game between small quantities of humans. A game that has only been around for a small part of a short-lived species, and it only affects a minority of its population.

The 'ESPers' claim that the outcome of such a children's game is to be the ultimate factor of whether or not the universe will continue to exist into the future, because their arbitrarily deemed 'God' figure says so.

As a being that has existed long into the future, and considering that right next to these ESPers is a group of human time travelers that have proven themselves to be also from the future, I find their claim to be rather futile, as the rest of us have all seen the future, and it did not involve demise over a children's game of baseball.

Yet, whenever the time travelers bring up this point the ESPers will yell and scream, throwing a hideous tantrum like the foolish, disobedient children they are.

So be it. They refuse to listen to reason. They always have. They always deny evidence that doesn't suit them, and pretend the most bizarre things are irrefutable. Pretending to know more when they know less. I'm amazed that anyone would consider them even functioning members of human society, let alone consider what they say as at all possibly true.

Perhaps if I were more youthful and lighthearted I would have found them a bit more amusing. Unfortunately, I knew they were far from joking. Worse still, I knew they would likely place the 'fate of the universe' onto whatever else their supposed God takes interest in.

I'll appease them for their baseball children's game. I'll go ahead and sway the outcome of the game in their favour. If they wish to think that they are truly important, so be it. Let them. I'll appease them in the future as well, I know. As too will the time travelers. Let then child think they're king. Let them win their baseball game.

Because in time, in the longer term, both I and the time travelers know something the ESPers do not. As such, I've decided (and I do believe the time travelers agree to an extent) that we should let excited children stay excited children for as long as they wish.

Both the time travelers and I have both seen the moment of their demise. The organisation won't last, and the ESPers will die out.

Because childhood only lasts so long.

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**A/N: I'm still here. Barely. This is just seriously hard to write. From an alien perspective and all.**

**Personally, I find it amazing how easily the Haruhi fanbase accepts Koizumi's explanations of Haruhi as a God, because if you think about it, compared to the time travellers (who are from the future) or the DITE (literally Data and Thought), the ESPers are the least likely to know what they're talking about or have evidence for their claims. As such, I think the DITE would have pretty poor opinion of the ESPers, considering how the organisation keeps acting like it's so much more correct than the time travellers or the DITE, despite being the smallest and shortest lasting of the groups.**


End file.
